Tools

Allinea Tools Up For Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor

By Adrian Bridgwater, November 17, 2012

Developer tools for highly parallel workloads

Allinea Software has announced the availability of its DDT parallel debugging tool for Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. The firm has also detailed forthcoming support in the Allinea MAP performance profiler.

NOTE: As detailed by Dr. Dobb's editor Andrew Binstock here, "The term 'coprocessor' should be understood in context. Every one of the Phi's cores can boot Linux and run any x86 software. However, the card itself needs to plug into a system that has an independent CPU, which basically oversees the Phi's operations."

The Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor "produces" over one teraflop per second [of workload computation] and has been designed for highly parallel workloads. Among its uses it is said to be particularly important in the fields of climate simulation, oil exploration, financial analysis, and scientific research.

"HPC users adopting Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors will have a clear eye on the performance ball," said Dr. David Lecomber, CTO of Allinea Software. "To get the most out of the hardware, they have to know where to parallelize and where to offload computation. The Allinea MAP profiler is a scalable tool that drills down to the source to show instantly where real bottlenecks are. The level of integration between Allinea DDT and Allinea MAP — with one consistent development environment — will be a unique and powerful enabler for HPC software developers."

"In releasing the Allinea DDT debugger with support for the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor today, users adapting their code will be able to fix software problems quickly — essential to any effective software project. Allinea DDT is ready to debug on this platform from the very start — from one node through to Petascale and beyond," he added.

"Allinea Software's support for the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor and the announcement of a combined development environment for debugging and profiling will be a valued resource for users of supercomputer systems using this exciting architecture," said James Reinders, director of parallel programming evangelism at Intel.

"The first products from the new Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor product family promise to bring a new capability to supercomputer performance and power efficiency without sacrificing programmability. Allinea Software highlights the flexibility of today's Intel Xeon processor-based systems by extending its popular solutions in a manner that is completely familiar to today's users."

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